I've made a start on reading Train Your Gaze: A Practical and Theoretical Introduction to Portrait Photography. I like the way the book sets assignments for you to do which are very different to what has been set by the OCA.
I hope to be able to give quite a few of these separate assignments a shot but I suppose my success very much depends on how long my friends and family will put up with me badgering them to pose for me.
Whilst reading about the early pioneers in photography and their work in relation to portraits it is amazing how much photography has developed and how easy it is not to take an image in comparison.
We have all seen the old portraits of our ancestors and how rigid and stern looking they appeared. With long exposures of up to 18 minutes in some cases subjects had to wear neck braces to keep their heads still. This contributed to the rigidity and serious demeanour that can be seen in early portraits.
Early portrait photographers very much concerned themselves with producing results based on painted portraits. This also contributed to the early style.
Often with the use of daguerrotypes, the focus and end result was very sharp, with what we would refer to as harsh light and high contrast. Juliet Margaret Cameron was to change this. She was very concerned with portraying the inner person as much as the outer image. She wanted to show the personality of the person in front of her lens. She wanted her images to speak of the type of person they were.
She had a technician remove some of the glass elements from her lens which resulted in a softer focus which in turn produced a more human like portrait instead of the statue like images of her contemporaries.
From my experience softer focus and light works well for female portraits and children and a more contrasty image works well for men.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/j/julia-margaret-cameron-collection-highlights/
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